


this is a song for no one

by kiira



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, or during an alternate s4, takes place in a vague non-canon compliant post-s4 universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-05 08:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6697708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/kiira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you find sameen in montana, and she puts three bullets in you: one in your thigh, your shoulder, right below your ribs. her hands are shaking, and you don’t know what they’re injecting her with: the shaw you know would never miss.</p><p>aka </p><p>01000110 01010101 01000011 01001011 00100000 01000010 01001001 01001110 01000001 01010010 01011001</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ok idc if the show has the machine talking in a voice i like the Binary Aesthetic

Sameen makes you irrational –– blasphemously, wonderfully irrational, and the clicking in your head tell you over and over to stop, turn back, abandon. 

_ 01001001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110011 _ , She clicks.

“I understand,” you hiss back at her, but: Sameen makes you sacrilegious, and you would have never cast yourself out for anyone else. 

_ 01010011 01010100 01001111 01010000.  _

They took Sameen to an abandoned office park in Pennsylvania, and She had refused to help you. It’s luck you find her, fucking luck. 

/

They took her to an abandoned hospital in Virginia –– it would have never been that easy. 

/

_ 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110000.  _

/

They took Sameen to a house outside of San Diego, rented under the name Samantha. 

You don’t laugh. 

/

_ 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101110 _ . 

/

You find Sameen in Montana, and she puts three bullets in you: one in your thigh, your shoulder, right below your ribs. Her hands are shaking, and you don’t know what they’re injecting her with: the Shaw you know would never miss. 

‘What did they do?’ You whisper to Her, but She doesn’t respond. She clicked  _ Stop  _ at you until your head was full of stops and starts, little explosions behind your eyes. She talked to you until some stretch of desert road halfway to Helena, and She hasn’t spoken since. 

Everything feels somehow empty. 

Sameen’s still shaking, gun pointed at you. You don’t want to pull a gun on her but: you have no choice, and even high on whatever they gave her, she’s still a fucking good marksman. 

“You’re not real,” she says steadily, barely missing your right ear. “You’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not  _ real,  _ you’re not real.” 

Even without Her in your head, you’re faster than Sameen is right now and the slump of her body in your arms is wonderfully familiar. 

/

“I understand,” you hear her whispering in her sleep, “I understand, I understand, I understand,” and her hair slips away from the side of her face. There’s a gash behind her ear, and you ache to put your fingers to it. Ache to touch the stitches you know match your scar, ache to hear the tinny voice in Sameen’s head. 

It’s not your voice, not Her voice –– some twisted simulacrum –– but you ache for the fullness it gives you. 

The necessity it gives you. 

Sameen mumbles something and sits straight up, eyes blank and wide. 

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she hisses at you, “you have to turn around.”

She can’t do anything, you made sure of that. The guns (and knives, and tasers, anything you could use to hurt someone) are all up front with you, you have Sameen zip tied to the back of a chair. 

Her head is tipped to the side, listening –– you’re torn between ripping the implant out of her head and begging for Her to talk to you again. 

You pull the van over on the side of the road, hard enough that Sameen is thrown into the door (you hope it bruises –– no you don’t) and crawl into the backseat next to her. 

“Sameen,” you breathe, inching your hands towards her thighs. 

She looks like she wants to stab you, hard and painful. 

“Sameen, can you hear Her?” 

Logically, you know she can’t; logically, you know she’s listening to Samaritan, or Greer, or nothing, nothing at all. 

You lean closer to her, hand trembling behind her ear, gently, you trace the ridge of raised stitches. The scar, her scar, won’t heal as prettily as yours did. She wouldn’t have someone to angrily shove her into a chair and clean the wound, every day as it healed. 

Sameen jolts away from you, your hair brushing the bare skin of her neck, pulling as far away as the zip ties allow. 

“Don’t fucking do this, Root,” and she refuses to speak. 

/

When you only ask for one hotel room, the teenage kid behind the desk leers, and you can feel Sameen straining for the knife you keep in your back pocket. You catch her wrist and twist it until she makes a pained hissing noise, and then you turn your attention to the boy. 

“My wife and I were hoping for a little weekend away,” and you twist Sameen’s wrist until you hear it crack, “away from the kids, and the noise and all,” and you smile sweetly at the boy. 

His leer falters off, and you think it’s something of a combination of your story and Sameen’s homicidal expression, but he doesn’t say a word except a muttered “Here’s your room, ma’am,”  and smacks the keys down onto the desk. 

Sameen’s head is bird-like as you drag her down the hallway, tilted up to the side and listening. You still don’t know who she’s listening to, what she’s listening for, but you don’t –– you don’t really care, because she’s here. 

_ 01101011 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 _

“Shut  _ up, _ ” you tell Her, and Sameen looks at you funny. 

“Not you, sweetie,” and she tries to twist away from your grip again. She forgot, you suppose, that you had hurt her wrist and you do have to give her credit for swallowing the pained whimper that she attempts to make. 

_ 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100101 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100110 01101001 01110010 01110011 01110100.  _

“Shut up, shut up, shut  _ up _ ,” you trust Sameen to let her go as you unlock the door, pressing your other hand against your ear. Sameen doesn’t move. 

“You broke my wrist,” she says shortly, as you shut the door behind her. 

“I’m sorry,” you are, you  _ are _ , “wouldn’t want to hurt those hands.”

She glares at you, and sits on the edge of the bed. “Doesn’t fucking matter, Root. None of this is real anyways.” 

You kneel in front of her, and hold her hands tight in yours. It hurts her, but she’s trained to never show pain –– she just makes a small hissing noise and stares at a point somewhere above your head. There’s a med-kit in the back of the van, but part of you is beginning to believe Sameen, believe that none of this is real. 

That if you leave her alone, you’ll return to an empty room, empty hands, empty head, empty empty empty. 

So you make do with what you have, and Sameen watches you the whole time. 

“You were always better at this, babe,” you whisper to her wrists, and she curls her fingers into claws. 

“Don’t, Root,” but there’s nothing hard, nothing sharp in her voice. 

_ 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 00111111 _ , She clicks, and you let Sameen’s hand fall. 

/

Of course you give Sameen the bed, carefully tie and cuff her wrists to the bedframe before you shove a chair from across the room to the side of her bed. She’s watching you silently, and she looks like  _ her _ but –– you don’t know what they did to her in all those hundreds of places. 

“Last time I saw these,” and you trace a finger along the handcuffs, because the room is so  _ heavy  _ and Sameen is looking at you with nothing you can read, “we were having a lot more fun.”

“Let me out,  _ Root, _ and I’ll show you fun.”

You kneel at the edge of the bed, and watch her carefully for a few seconds, trace the lines of her face, the shadows of her eyelashes, the curl of her lips –– to be honest, you already have it memorized. 

“You’re fucking creepy,” she spits at you, and you don’t move. 

“What can you hear, Sameen?”

Her eyes unfocus a little, and she’s listening.

“Sameen,” you beg, “what can you hear?”

“Nothing,” she admits slowly, “absolutely nothing. I used to –– like a voice, but …” she trails off as you stand and fold yourself into the little chair. 

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” you ask, and she doesn’t respond. 

/

01110100 01100101 01110010 01110010 01101001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01011011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00101101 01110101 01101000 00101101 01100010 01110101 01101000 01101100 01011101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01101101 01101001 01100100 01100001 01100010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 00111011

/

You wake up sometime in the night, and Sameen is watching you. 

“Go back to sleep, Root,” she whispers, “this isn’t real.”

/

Three days later, you let Sameen sit next to you in the front seat –– she stopped insisting nothing was real, and you fill the hollow place in yourself with her. 

It’s how you work: flipping between idols, and She felt huge and permanent but now. You heard her voice once in Minnesota, twice in Indiana, once more in Virginia, always the same thing. 

_ 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110010 00001010  _

You live in absolutes of adoration and you are. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ok so like .. the first chapter of this fit w what happened in last nights ep so ..... i wrote a 2nd chapter

Root find you 5,412 times. They perfect the tiny gasp she makes, the way her eyes widen, the soft way she breathes  _ Sameen _ by the 632nd time––they never get the way she freezes, how she looks at you with a horrifying reverence. 

In 2,732 universes, you kill her. 

/

It’s not her––it’s not her of  _ course _ and you figure this out every time. Once it was because of the way she smiles, another because of how her hands move all wrong. 

You kill her twelve times because she’s not wearing nail polish. 

/

_ Sameen _ , she breathes, soft and like she’s looking at the sun. 

You put three bullets into her: shoulder, ribs, thigh. There’s a buzzing in the back of your skull, you feel like everything is tipping sideways, and Root is looking at you like you’re some kind of vision. 

She’s doing the frightened deer thing, where she tips her head up, listening to some word from her god. Her face falls, slightly, for a half moment and you know her god isn’t listening anymore. Your hands are shaking as you aim the gun at her head, they remembered her suicidal devotion to a machine a thousand turns ago. 

“You’re not real,” you whisper to yourself, whisper to her. Remind her that she isn’t herself, that she won’t feel it when she kills you. Remind yourself you’ve done this before. “You’re not  _ real,  _ you’re not real, you’re not real.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she whispers, closer than you thought, and digs her taser into the soft skin under your jaw. 

You remember a basement, your hands around her neck, and then nothing. 

/

Around turn 300, they remember to put in Bear. Or they learn about Bear. 

Or you tell them.

Whatever it is, you’ve buried your face in his fur thousands of times, and it almost makes it worth it to stay. 

/

You come to again in the back of a van, zip tied to the passenger chair. Root shoved a pillow between your head and the car door she propped you against, and you would laugh if you couldn’t still hear the buzzing in your head. 

Root’s crouching before you, holding her taser. 

“You wouldn’t have come with me if I asked,” she singsongs.

The zip ties cut around your wrists, and you remember sun; you remember Root; the steering wheel. 

You shake your head, they do this every time. Pull your memories out and twist them, use them against you. 

“You have to turn back,” you remind her. 

“You’ve said that three times now,” and she pulls your hair away from your neck. Her fingers are cold and hard on the scar behind your ear, like she’s trying to feel through your skull, trying to dig the voice out of your head with her shiny black nails. 

“I can’t hear anything,” you say for the third time, you lie. 

No voices, not here, not this time. Sometimes you strain, think you can hear someone whispering outside of the car. Sometimes it’s just buzzing. 

She nods again, but doesn’t move her fingers. You wonder if she’s trying to pull it out or if she’s trying to get closer to it. Maybe both. 

“It’s not your machine,” you tell her again––she feels so  _ real _ , you forget yourself, forget that they’re listening to everything you say. 

“I know,” she whispers. “We match now, Sameen,” voice bordering on veneration and you freeze. 

She traces her fingers down your jaw, digs her nails into your neck. Root’s terrible devotion is real, and you can’t find a place where they got her wrong. 

“I thought I told you not to fucking do this, not anymore.”

She traces your scar one more time, fingers soft, and then she’s gone. 

/

“We should be dead by now,” you tell her twenty-three days after she rips you out of Samaritan. “We’ve never lasted this long.” 

From the look on her face, you know she’s thinking about her holy war, her showdown of the ASIs. You’re talking about the way the gun felt warm after you shot her two thousand seven hundred and thirty two times, about the way you always killed her the same way. 

A bullet between the eyes. 

(That’s a lie: your hands shook once, you watched her die, there were seconds where you forgot she was fake).

You know she keeps a gun in the glove compartment, you know she trusts you enough to not handcuff you anymore, you know it would take you twelve seconds to shoot her. 

Usually, by now Root’s mentioned Reese or Finch or anyone, usually she’s tried to get some sliver of information out of you. This Root’s only mentioned Bear, told you a long story where nothing happened except a particularly cold walk in the park. Told you how much he missed you, how he slept on your bed for weeks. She’s talking about herself, you know. You can read it in the way her eyes get distant, how her hands twitch slightly. 

“I never stopped looking for you, you know,” she says suddenly. 

Your hands itch for the gun: she’s said this before. 

/

Somewhere in an endless stretch of desert, she hands you the keys. 

“I’m sick of driving,” and you can hear the pout in her voice. “You do it.”

/

There’s nothing Samaritan doesn’t know, and you remind yourself of this while you’re lying awake, watching Root sleep next to you. 

It’s been thirty-one days, and she hasn’t even tried to kiss you––she always kisses you. 

“You sick of watching me fuck her?” You whisper to yourself, to Greer, to the chip in your head. Root makes a quiet noise and turns over to face you, still mostly asleep. 

“You talking to me?” She mumbles, and she’s deceivingly soft this early. 

“It’s three in the morning, Root. Go the fuck to sleep.”

Neither of you sleep very much, sleep at all, anymore. There’s some part of you that  _ knows  _ that once you close your eyes, you’ll wake up back in that lab, people watching you like you’re some kind of  _ thing. _

That’s never how the rules worked before, but they’ve never given you a Root as perfect as her. 

You don’t know why she doesn’t sleep: she’s afraid you’ll kill her or she knows Samaritan is following you or she’s scared this isn’t real. 

/

You know which one it is: you like to pretend you don’t. 

/

In the middle of North Dakota, you shoot yourself in the arm. It’s been too long, you’ve been safe for far too long, and you don’t know what Samaritan's game is anymore. Root hasn’t tried to get anything out of you, and she makes a strangled screaming noise when you pull the trigger. 

You don’t know if she’s screaming for you, or for all the information locked in your head. 

/

She cleans the wound with trembling hands; your gun is forgotten in a dusty patch of weeds. 

“I can do this,” you mutter at her bowed head, kicking at the bumper of the car. 

“I know,” and she doesn’t stop. 

It’s a few more minutes of silence, of the sun setting across the waving prairie, of Root’s cold hands on your arm. 

“Are you okay?” She asks, curling her fingers around your wrist, into your palm. Your eyes skitter to the gun, this is something she’s said before. 

It’s dark before you answer her, dark enough to not be able to see her eyes. 

“I’ve killed you,” you say, and she makes a tiny sound of protest. “No, I’ve killed you, and I can’t tell if I’m supposed to now.”

She’s quiet for a moment, slides down to sit against the car’s wheel. Looking at the same empty prairie as you are. 

“Why do you have to kill me?”

“Because you’re Samaritan,” and her back tightens slightly, “you’re Samaritan and you’re using Root to get information out of me.”

“Oh,” she breathes, and opens her mouth. All of your secrets come spilling out––the empty earth of McLean County, North Dakota knows everything Samaritan has tried to kill you for. 

Root finishes; the sun sinks below the horizon. 

You bump your foot against her shoulder, and breathe. 

/

Root leaves the gun in the open prairie. She has three more in the glove compartment, two under the center console, and four knives in the lining of the driver’s seat. 

It’s the thought that matters. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I STILL DONT KNO W HOW TO write these characters je suis desolee 
> 
> come hang out w me @ rebeccaasutter.tumblr.com

**Author's Note:**

> 1) root is a self-indulgent character in this yike  
> 2) srry ive never written these characters b4 pls excuse me  
> 3) im bad at geography have fun w the Fake Outline of the american west
> 
> come exist @ rebeccaasutter.tumblr.com


End file.
